TYPES OF MEANING

Semantic as one of the branches of pure linguistics is simply defined as the study
of meaning in language. before going any further, first thing that you have to know
is the word meaning itself, which becomes the focus of this study. Ferdinand
de Saussure, one of the structuralism scholars introduces seven dichotomies in the
effort to understand language, one of them is signifiant and signifie dichotomy.
The first term refers to the form of language which is involved in a collection of
phonemes, or in other words signifiant is the acoustic form of language or the
basic form of phonological system of a language. Meanwhile, the second term
refers to the mental image of a language, mental image refers to the intended
meaning of it. De Saussure tried to tell us that in a language there must be symbols
and thing that it's symbolized. The symbol can be so vary, it can be written, oral,
and image, and the things represented by those symbols are generally called
meaning.
A word is the smallest unit of spoken language which has meaning and can stand
alone, it is a written representation of one or more sounds which can be spoken to
represent an idea, object, action, etc. in order to be understood by the people, a
word must have a meaning.
Most words have more than one meaning, it is the characteristic of words that a
single word may have several meaning, in fact, words may play an enormous part
in our life. Words are used to express something and also conveys feelings about
we are describing. Words are used not in isolation but related to human situation. It
is through our experience with them in human situation that they take on meaning.
I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on this, but I do want to take enough time
to be clear that there are, unambiguously, numerous types of meaning. Why is this
important? When we talk about teaching and learning, we are often talking about
meaning. Consider the classic constructivist activity of 'making meaning', for
example. Or event he concept of 'content', which is (ostensibly) the 'meaning' of
whatever it is that a student is being taught.
What are we to make of such theorizing in the light of the numerous ways that
words, sentences, ideas and constructs can have meaning? What does 'making

meaning' mean we consider the range between logical, semantically, and functional
meaning?
The idea - often so central to transmission and transactional theorists of learning,
that a word or sentence can have a single meaning, or a 'shared meaning', is tested
to the extreme by an examination of the nature and constitution of that putative
meaning.
In any case, it is always better to show than to argue. There are at least seven types
of meaning (many linguists state their different categories of meaning) in
semantic according Geoffrey Leech (1974), those are:
1. Conceptual meaning (logical, cognitive, or denotative content)
It refers to the dictionary meaning which indicates the concepts. In reading we can
find many different words have the same conceptual meanings. Take the word walk
as an example, the conceptual meaning or the primary dictionary meaning is to
move forward by placing one foot in front of the other. There are also a few other
words that, according to the dictionary, mean to move forward on foot, etc.
2. Connotative meaning (what is communicated by virtue of what language refers
to)
It refers to the associations that are connected to a certain word or the emotional
suggestions related to that word. The connotative meanings of a word exist
together with the denotative meanings. The connotations for the word snake could
include evil or danger.

3. Social meaning (what is communicated of the social circumstances of language

use)

It refers to the usage of language in and by society which has big proportions in
determining the meaning that certain speaker has to use and wants to convey, those
factors include social class of the speaker and hearer and the degree of
formality. Only part of the social meaning of a conversation is carried by words.
Take saying hello or talking about the weather. Often such talk has little dictionary
meaning. It is a way of being friendly or polite.

4. Affective meaning (what is communicated of the feeling and attitudes of the

speaker/writer)
It refers to the speakers feeling / attitude towards the content or the ongoing
context. It is important to remember that each individual will have a different
affective meaning for a word. As such, only the person using a word will be aware
of the particular affective meaning that they hold with the word. For example, we
can discuss the word winter further. The word winter denotatively refers to a time
period during which either the northern or southern hemisphere is furthest away
from the sun. Different use of stress and intonation also provides a striking contrast
in the feelings and attitudes communicated through an utterance.
5. Reflected meaning (what is communicated through association with another
sense of the same expression)
It refers to terms which have more than one meaning surfaces at the same time, so
there is a kind of ambiguity. It is as if one or more unintended meanings were
inevitably thrown back rather like light or sound reflected on a surface. For
instance, if I use the medical expression chronic bronchitis, it is difficult for the
more colloquial emotive meaning of chronic, 'bad,' not to intrude as well. . . .
Sometimes, such coincidental, 'unwanted' meanings cause us to change a lexical
item for another.
6. Collocative meaning (what is communicated through association with words
which tend to occur in the environment of another word)

It refers to the associations a word acquires on account of the meanings of

words which tend to occur in its environment. In other words, it is that part of the
word-meaning suggested by the words that go before or come after a word in
question, for instance, heavy news (a piece of sad news); heavy schedule (a very
tight schedule); fast color (the color that does not fade); fast friend (a reliable
friend); fast woman (a lady of easy virtue), etc.
7. Thematic meaning (what is communicated by the way in which the message is
organized in terms of order and emphasis).
It relates to or constitutes a topic of discourse, the meaning that the word conveys
is that of something that is connected with the theme of something
Types 2-6 are also categorized as associative meaning.
According to Charles Morris, there are three types of meanings: referential
meaning (the relationship between signs and entities in the world), pragmatic
meaning (the relationship between signs and their users; it includes identification
meaning, expressive meaning, associative meaning, social meaning, and
imperative meaning), and intralingua meaning (the relationship between different
signs; it includes phonological meaning, grapheme meaning, morphological or
lexemic meaning, syntactic meaning, and discourse or textual meaning).
The purpose of semantic is to propose exact meanings of the words and phrases
and remove confusion, which might lead the readers to believe a word has many
possible meanings. It makes a relationship between a word and the sentence
through their meanings. Besides, semantic enables the readers to explore a sense of
the meaning, because if we remove or change the place of a single word from the
sentence, it will change the entire meanings, or else the sentence will become
anomalous. Hence, the sense relation inside a sentence is very important, as a
single word does not carry any sense or meaning.